Anyone interested in 'good government' should read Jerry Mashaw's new book on how the social Security Administration implements congressionally mandated policy for controlled consistent distribution of disability benefits. . . . He offers an important perspective on bureaucracy that must be considered when devising procedures for not only disability determinations but also other forms of administrative adjudication.--Linda A. O'Hare, American Bar Association Journal A major contribution to the ongoing debate about administrative law and mass justice.--Lance Liebman and Richard B. Stewart, Harvard Law Review Profound implications for the future of democratic government. . . . Practical, analytical policymaking for a complex decision system of great significance to many Americans.--Paul R. Verkuil, Yale Law Journal An exceptionally valuable book for anyone who is concerned about the role of law in the administrative state. Mashaw manages to range broadly without becoming superficial, and to present a coherent and challenging theory in lively, readable prose. Bureaucratic Justice seems certain to become a standard reference work for administrative lawyers, and for anyone else who seeks the elusive goal of developing more humane and more effective public bureaucracies.--Barry Boyer, Michigan Law Review Strongly recommended for use in graduate seminars in public policy or law. . . . If we are to develop a positive model of bureaucratic competence, we must answer the insightful questions rased in this cogent book.--David L. Martin, American Political Science Review Mashaw provides an excellent analysis of middle range processes of decision making.--Gerald Turkel, Qualitative Sociology Stimulating and provocative and . . . makes a contribution to the ongoing dialogue about due process in public administration.... It is tightly organized, cogently argued, and full of pithy historical illustrations. . . . One of the best such works in many years. --Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science A thoughtful, challenging, and very useful book.--Choice Inspires a new direction in administrative law scholarship.--A.I. Ogus, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies

The classic book on the way American government agencies work and how they can be made to work better -- the "masterwork" of political scientist James Q. Wilson (The Economist) In Bureaucracy, the distinguished scholar James Q. Wilson examines a wide range of bureaucracies, including the US Army, the FBI, the CIA, the FCC, and the Social Security Administration, providing the first comprehensive, in-depth analysis of what government agencies do, why they operate the way they do, and how they might become more responsible and effective. It is the essential guide to understanding how American government works.

Street-Level Bureaucracy is an insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs.

The Department of Justice is America’s premier federal law enforcement agency. And according to J. Christian Adams, it’s also a base used by leftwing radicals to impose a fringe agenda on the American people. A five-year veteran of the DOJ and a key attorney in pursuing the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, Adams recounts the shocking story of how a once-storied federal agency, the DOJ’s Civil Rights division has degenerated into a politicized fiefdom for far-left militants, where the enforcement of the law depends on the race of the victim.

-- Political Science Quarterly

The first edition of Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy is one of the most successful Brookings titles of all time. This thoroughly revised version updates that classic analysis of the role played by the federal bureaucracy—civilian career officials, political appointees, and military officers—and Congress in formulating U.S. national security policy, illustrating how policy decisions are actually made. Government agencies, departments, and individuals all have certain interests to preserve and promote. Those priorities, and the conflicts they sometimes spark, heavily influence the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. A decision that looks like an orchestrated attempt to influence another country may in fact represent a shaky compromise between rival elements within the U.S. government. The authors provide numerous examples of bureaucratic maneuvering and reveal how they have influenced our international relations. The revised edition includes new examples of bureaucratic politics from the past three decades, from Jimmy Carter's view of the State Department to conflicts between George W. Bush and the bureaucracy regarding Iraq. The second edition also includes a new analysis of Congress's role in the politics of foreign policymaking.

A "searing, searching, and eloquent" (Martha Minow, Harvard Law School) investigation into the role of the legal profession in perpetuating mass incarceration--now in an accessible paperback format from the award-winning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings--an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color, for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty offers a radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively--and wildly successfully--challenging it. Hailed by luminaries from James Forman Jr. and Vanita Gupta to U.S. Circuit Judge Bernice Donald, and MacArthur Award-winning poet and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts, Usual Cruelty offers a condemnation of the whole deplorable enterprise, starting with profound questions about the specific things our system chooses to criminalize (marijuana plants, low-level gambling, petty theft) versus those we don't (tobacco plants, high-level gambling by bankers, massive wage theft by employers). It calls out a bail system that charges people money to go free despite the lack of any evidence this will make them more likely to show up in court or make anybody safer. And it explores the everyday brutality of our courts, prisons, and jails, and the ways in which the legal profession has allowed itself to become desensitized to the everyday pain these institutions inflict on our most vulnerable populations. Now in an accessible paperback format, Usual Cruelty will cement Karakatsanis's reputation as one of the most inspiring civil rights lawyers of our time.

From two legal luminaries, a highly original framework for restoring confidence in a government bureaucracy increasingly derided as “the deep state.” Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? Intolerable? American public law has long been riven by a persistent, serious conflict, a kind of low-grade cold war, over these questions. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed, as long as public officials are constrained by what they call the morality of administrative law. Law and Leviathan elaborates a number of principles that underlie this moral regime. Officials who respect that morality never fail to make rules in the first place. They ensure transparency, so that people are made aware of the rules with which they must comply. They never abuse retroactivity, so that people can rely on current rules, which are not under constant threat of change. They make rules that are understandable and avoid issuing rules that contradict each other. These principles may seem simple, but they have a great deal of power. Already, without explicit enunciation, they limit the activities of administrative agencies every day. But we can aspire for better. In more robust form, these principles could address many of the concerns that have critics of the administrative state mourning what they see as the demise of the rule of law. The bureaucratic Leviathan may be an inescapable reality of complex modern democracies, but Sunstein and Vermeule show how we can at last make peace between those who accept its necessity and those who yearn for its downfall.

Responsive Legality is an important book about twenty first century justice. It explores the legal and moral values that twenty-first-century public officials use to make their decisions, engaging existing theoretical models of administrative justice and updating them to reflect changed twenty-first-century conditions. Together, these features of twenty-first century public administration are coined ‘responsive legality’. Whereas twentieth-century public officials were generally driven by their concern for bureaucratic rationality, professional treatment, moral judgement and – towards the end of the century – the logics of ‘new managerialism’, the twenty-first-century public official embodies greater complexity in their characteristic pursuit of substantive and procedural justice. In responsive legality, government decision makers show a distinct concern for the protective parameters of the rule of law, a purposive pursuit of fair outcomes and a commitment to flexible decision making.

Human rights are politically fraught in Turkey, provoking suspicion and scrutiny among government workers for their anti-establishment left-wing connotations. Nevertheless, with eyes worldwide trained on Turkish politics, and with accession to the European Union underway, Turkey's human rights record remains a key indicator of its governmental legitimacy. Bureaucratic Intimacies shows how government workers encounter human rights rhetoric through training programs and articulates the perils and promises of these encounters for the subjects and objects of Turkish governance. Drawing on years of participant observation in programs for police officers, judges and prosecutors, healthcare workers, and prison personnel, Elif M. Babül argues that the accession process does not always advance human rights. In casting rights as requirements for expertise and professionalism, training programs strip human rights of their radical valences, disassociating them from their political meanings within grassroots movements. Translation of human rights into a tool of good governance leads to competing understandings of what human rights should do, not necessarily to liberal, transparent, and accountable governmental practices. And even as translation renders human rights relevant for the everyday practices of government workers, it ultimately comes at a cost to the politics of human rights in Turkey.